“I can tell you’re happy. You are glowing!”

How many of you have heard someone say that either to you or someone you know?

I’ll bet most of you have. We love to see that happy “glow” on someone’s face. In fact, it makes us smile to see someone looking that extraordinarily happy!

Happiness is not only thrilling, it’s contagious. One person glowing makes everyone around them feel good and hopeful about their own dreams and their own lives. After all, who doesn’t love to feel happy! Or to see someone else that happy?

When someone glows, we know he or she is truly full of joy. That person literally illuminates the room from the inside out.

Inside out –now that’s an important phrase when it comes to happiness.

True happiness emerges from the inside out.

Hence, the glow!

Perhaps that’s the kind of glow that surrounded Jesus at the moment of his baptism! When Jesus was being baptized, as he was praying, the scriptures tell us that the heavens opened up and the Holy Spirit came down upon him “in bodily form” “like a dove.” A dove….like a white, fluttering, wavering, body? Did God embody Jesus in this experience?  Was he suddenly transfigured into the wavering breath/light of God? Did he glow from the inside out as God portrayed the incarnation from Father to Son through the vehicle of the Holy Spirit? We can only wonder what that must have looked like! But surely in all of that white light, he glowed!

And a voice from heaven said, “You are my Son, whom I dearly love; in you I find happiness (CEB).” In this incarnational moment of Jesus’ baptism in which he began God’s earthly mission, God glowed with pleasure, happiness, joy, God-ness in the vehicle of the Son Jesus, messiah and earthly Lord.

Now I don’t know about you, but I found it interesting that the CEB interpretation of scripture used the word happiness instead of the usual “well pleased.”

What could this mean? The entire interchange in this scripture is a bit unusual. Jesus is being baptized by John. As this is happening, some supernatural occurrences begin. From the scripture reading, we really can’t tell whether John and others are witnessing the Holy Spirit descending bodily upon Jesus “like” a dove. What does that mean anyway, “like a dove”? And then there’s God’s voice from heaven, speaking directly to Jesus, declaring love, and feeling happiness or delight in this encounter.

It’s as though God embodies Jesus in a holy “hug” and then glows with happiness like a proud Papa.

Did John witness this?  Or are we reading a narration of Jesus’ experience?  Is this a kind of mystical or spiritual experience that Jesus himself undergoes that is not seen by others but known by Jesus exclusively?

As the reader, we can’t tell.

What we do know is that these curious events have got to be important. Otherwise, Luke would not have taken the time here to relay them and in exactly this way.

What did it mean for God to “bodily” envelope Jesus?

What did it mean for God to find “happiness” or “pleasure” in Jesus? Technically, in God’s own self?

The Greek eudokeo gives us a clue.

The Greek word has multiple meanings as Greek words usually do. Here it can mean to consent to, approve of, find favor with, be pleased with, be happy with, to take delight in, to take pleasure in.

God the Creator takes pleasure in revealing himself through Jesus. God has incarnated God’s self in human form, and God is calling it “good.” God does not say, I take pleasure in doing this, or I take pleasure in your baptism. God says, I take pleasure in “you.” Through the Son Jesus, God literally “glows” with happiness, esteem, pleasure, and confirmation of the incarnation.

The Greek literally reads, “You are the Son of Me, the beloved. In you I am fully pleased.”

Is it no wonder that Jesus is glowing in this encounter, just as he will be again at his transfiguration, his resurrection, and in his later ascension. He is the Light of God. And in that moment, we know it, see it, acknowledge it, affirm it.

God’s “happiness” is in God’s presence itself.

Now we think of ourselves as happy or unhappy. But we seldom think of God as happy. And yet, from the first signs of creation, God felt pleased, because creation was “good” (hennah tov –in harmony with God). The Hebrew word “tov” means good, beautiful, behaving as it should, happy, in harmony with God. When someone wishes someone “Mazel Tov!” it is a wish for happiness and congratulations all in the same breath. Tov is a state of being. In the creation story, God looked at what God created and declared it “good”  --“tov.”

Likewise, when God declares Son Jesus to be beloved, God’s embodiment, God’s incarnate act itself exudes what we identify as pleasure. God glows.

God’s incarnation is “good.” God in the form of his Son is “good.” God’s plan for his beloved creation is “good.” God’s salvific journey has begun, and this is very, very “good.” God in Jesus has inaugurated a plan that will lead humanity and all of creation back to a state of “tov” –in which all creation is again in beautiful harmony with God.

Creation is good because God is in relationship with it. Jesus is “beloved,” and God is full of pleasure in this act of incarnation because God is inherent within him. In Jesus, God’s plan for creation will be fulfilled.

God’s happiness exudes through Jesus from the inside out.

And when we are in close relationship with Jesus, we too glow with the pleasure of God.

Sometimes in our lives, we can get confused by what we simply like or find fun in doing and what causes us true happiness.

Author Remez Sasson delineates a difference between what we enjoy and what grants us true happiness.[1]

We can enjoy eating cake.

We can enjoy a beautiful piece of music.

We can enjoy buying new clothes.

We can enjoy good food, a great book, or the visage of a beautiful face.

But none of these provide us with true, lasting happiness. None of these make us glow.

We glow when our hearts are engaged with God and another. We bask in God’s love, and we find joy in the love we give and share with others. When we love someone, and person supports us, lifts us up, and bathes us in love, we glow in the light of their heart-hug.

It’s the same when we get close to God. You can see visually someone who has been “bathed” in the light of God’s love. That person shines with light, love, and a joy that can only come from the inside out. And that kind of joy is absolutely contagious.

We all need that kind of happiness in our lives, the kind of happiness that can course through us from the inside out, the kind that makes us glow with the aftereffect of the kind of light that only God can bring into our lives.

You think you’ve seen someone glow from a romantic encounter or an engagement to their beloved? That’s only a fraction of the glow in someone’s face who has had a true encounter with God.

Never underestimate the power of God in your life or in the lives of others. Want to experience God face to face?

Look for that glow on the face of someone you meet. You can be sure that it comes from a very special kind of joy.

You can have that glow too. For whenever one of us follows Jesus, dares the true path that Jesus wants us to take. Whenever one of us opens our heart to God in a new and beautiful way, God smiles. And you….you glow.